South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [14]
Gladys went to the parlor and stood beside her desk, holding her wallet, fingering slowly through the bills, and suddenly Madeline Understood something she hadn’t considered before. Gladys maybe couldn’t afford this feeding of the needy. Maybe she couldn’t even afford to feed Madeline.
In a moment Gladys came back. “I think this will be enough. If not—”
“I’ve got a little cash on me.”
Gladys nodded stiffly and cleared her throat. “You asked about your grandfather. Where he lived. He didn’t live Up here Until later. He was from Crosscut, really.”
Madeline’s birth certificate said she’d been born in McAllaster, Michigan, on the fourth of November, 1974, to Jackie Lee Stone, father Unknown. “But then how was I born here, why was Jackie—”
“He lived at 512 Pine Street,” Gladys went on doggedly. “Since you’re going down there I thought you might want to know.”
Madeline studied Gladys. She’d said all she meant to for now, that was clear. “Okay. Thanks for telling me.”
“I’ll reimburse you if I’m short of cash on the groceries. And hurry, I don’t want to wait all day.”
The miles themselves defeated the idea of hurry. The sun had come out, the sky was blue, the swamps were watery and mossy, ringed with pines. Endless, endless miles of that. How long would it take to find anyone who wandered off and got lost? Days? Weeks? Never? The road wound its lonesome, resolute way south, and it seemed as if the rest of the world might not exist. Between McAllaster and Crosscut there were only a few settlements and crossroads. Madeline passed Wolf and Halfway, both of them hardly more than a handful of shacks, though at Halfway there was a bar and a general store with one gas pump out front. Here and there a dirt track wound off into the woods to who knew where.
The swampy forests, the bright, sharp air, the smell and feeling of it all—it smelled like freedom, like something wild and elemental that she’d never known before. Then she passed a decrepit cabin with a yard strewn with garbage and it was impossible to imagine the life lived there as anything but hopeless.
It’s was all mixed Up, beautiful and bleak, both. Finally she emerged from the swamp and came Up on the town. The first thing she saw was a sign that said “Prison Area—Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers.” Next she passed a glass case with a smashed-Up snowmobile in it. A banner over the top said, “Ojibwa County Snowtrails Wants You to Drink Responsibly!” Across the road from that was the Crosscut State Correctional Facility, where double wire-mesh fences twenty feet high and topped with cyclones of barbed wire surrounded a swampy meadow. She crossed a railroad track where a train sat with its cars loaded with timber, and then passed an enormous, listing hulk of a building with boarded-up windows that had “Crazy L Saloon” painted in faded letters across one wall.
She found the grocery store (there was only one), and spent all of Gladys’s money plus a little of her own. Then she went in search of her grandfather’s house.
Number 512 Pine was two stories of Unpainted clapboard with no porch or shutters to soften it, not even a step Up to the front door. An Upstairs window had a long crack in the glass and the curtains looked like old bedsheets. There were half a dozen kids’bikes in the yard, a dented pickup in the drive, a big, skinny dog chained to a stake beneath a tree. It leapt Up and barked at her furiously when she made a tentative move to get out of the car. The front door opened and a lumpy woman with an aura of rage leaned out and screamed at the dog to shut Up.
After an Uneasy moment Madeline put the car in drive and headed back to McAllaster.
Gladys helped pack up Madeline’s car with casserole dishes and plates of cookies and loaves of bread wrapped in tinfoil late that afternoon, and then gave her directions.
“You’d better hurry, it looks like rain, those clouds came out of nowhere. Go to Randi Hopkins’s place first, she’s right in town, I made you a map.” Gladys produced a sheet of paper she’d worked on while Madeline was gone